Throw-Away e-Mail Addresses

On my Bloglines account, I have digg.com. Last week, an article came through regarding BugMeNot. One of the comments on digg.com referred to dodgeit.com. Then today, another article came through digg.com regarding Jetable.org.

This small flurry got me thinking about throw-away e-mail addresses so I went to both sites to see what was up. Both services provide the same general services of providing "blind" e-mail addresses. I did notice a couple of differences though.

Jetable requires that the addresses be requested in advance and redirects to your actual e-mail address. You can specify a life span for that forwarding to be one hour, one day, one week, or one month. The interface is a little backwards. You give them your e-mail address and life span and they give you an @jetable.org address back, e.g. ytmkixj2cptv16m@jetable.net. They acknowledge in their FAQ that they keep logs "for legal reasons only."

On the other hand, dodgeit allows you to pick a e-mail address ad hoc, e.g. onetimeben@dodgeit.com, (hoping that no one else is using it). Then after you use it, you go to dodgeit and enter that e-mail address and pick up your e-mail. The functionality is pretty low (or the detail is high) as the presentation is just the raw e-mail.

You can even request an RSS feed of that e-mail address so you can monitor it. The e-mail gets deleted after 7 days. For a donation, you can password protect that dodgeit e-mail address and extend the retention. dodgeit doesn't say anything about privacy.

Both are pretty interesting but dodgeit seems to fit my occasional needs best.